There
aren't many academics whose lectures have ever called for riot police.
John Crace talks to Ted Honderich about his enemies of the left, right
and centre.

If you can judge a man by his enemies, then the only definite
conclusion you can reach about Ted Honderich is that he's always up for
a ruck. It takes a certain genius to earn the implacable, simultaneous
hostility of both the neo-Zionists and the Palestinians, but Honderich
has managed it without much effort and, to complete the hat trick, he
has become persona non grata
for New Labour. It's a performance worthy of a premier league
politician: for a philosopher it is truly remarkable.

For many years Honderich was Grote professor of philosophy at
University College London, where he worked diligently and obediently --
"I prefer the word prudentially" -- on consciousness, determinism and
political violence. His work was never safe but it attracted few
critics outside the confines of Bloomsbury and Hampstead. Until he
retired five years ago and became emeritus Grote professor. At which
point the blue touch paper was lit and Honderich notably failed to
stand back.

Like any committed determinist, Honderich is reluctant to ascribe any
direct causation between the liberation of retirement and his upping
the ante of philosophical debate. "It is true that I might have been
more careful in the past," he says, "but we are always far too eager to
identify a single cause -- usually a human action -- in the hope of
picking out something that is more explanatory. I would suggest there
are many other factors rooted in my past, such as my father's
unlettered communism, that may have played a part."

Even so. Honderich is also a consequentialist, which partly explains
his hatred towards Tony Blair. "He is always asking to be judged by the
morality of his intentions," he spits. "He doesn't understand that no
one cares about his fucking morality. We judge him by the consequences
of his actions. In any case, his morality is so muddy and
ill-considered. I'm increasingly coming to the opinion that Blair's
main problem is that he's not very bright." New Labour and Blair are
leitmotifs that regularly punctuate his conversation and they're too
entertaining to interrupt.

But as a consequentialist, even Honderich would have to acknowledge
that one of the main upshots of his retirement has been controversy.
The main trouble started in September 2002 with the publication of After the Terror, in which
Honderich asserted the moral right of Palestinians to resist ethnic
cleansing by the Israelis with terrorism. "I didn't set out to be
controversial," he insists. "Rather that position was the logical
conclusion of a basic argument on humanity." Needless to say, it didn't
go down too well in some quarters. Honderich had promised to give
£5,000 of his royalties to Oxfam, and a Toronto newspaper
threatened to expose the charity for taking donations from a terrorist
sympathiser. "The deputy director gave in to the threat," Honderich
says, "thereby dishonouring the charity," though Oxfam argued it could
not benefit from certain opinions in the book.

But this was just a few sparklers before the real fireworks began, with
the book's German publication the following year. In August 2003, Micha
Brumlik, director of a centre for Holocaust studies and professor of
science education at Frankfurt University, wrote a letter in the
Frankfurter Rundschau condemning the book as anti-semitic. The next day
Jurgen Habermas, the leading German philosopher who had initially
recommended the book for German translation, wrote a follow-up piece
arguing that the book was not anti-semitic, though doing so in
sufficiently apologetic terms to leave room for doubt. "Like any decent
German," Honderich says, "who is placed close to a charge of
anti-semitism, he was worried that some might rub off."

From here on things went manic. The publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag,
announced that it was banning the book. Honderich mounted a vociferous
campaign of self-defence while German TV crews were parked in the
garden outside his Somerset home. "I called for Brumlik's sacking," he
says, "because he had fallen well short of academic standards of
decency.

"To call me an anti-semite was just a lie. My first wife was Jewish, I
have Jewish children and grandchildren, and I have always gone on
record as a supporter of the right of the state of Israel to exist.
That's why the Palestinians are opposed to me. What I don't support is
Israel's expansionism after the 1967 war."

Matters settled down a little when a Jewish publisher offered to
publish the book, but even then Honderich's first lecture back in
Germany turned out to be a bear garden. "There were riot police in the
auditorium, plain-clothed protection for my wife and three sets of
competing demonstrators," he recalls. "There were the neo-Zionists
protesting about my original argument, the neo-Nazis protesting about
the neo-Zionist protesters, and the residual legatees of the
Baader-Meinhof gang who like to turn up anywhere. Still, we got through
it somehow."

His reputation has recovered in Germany, but he's still had to fight
off the neo-Zionists elsewhere. The Germans may take their philosophy
more seriously than us Brits, but it hasn't stopped a few opportunists
from trying to cash in. "I was recently accused of anti-semitism in a
student magazine," he says drily. "That slur cost them £2,000 in
legal fees and a full apology."

Honderich may be in for further trouble with his revised edition of the
Oxford Companion to Philosophy.
He's typically downbeat about his part in the original project. "I
think I was only asked because I was considered reliable," he says.
"Other philosophers had said they would do it and then failed to
deliver on deadline. I imagine they thought it wasn't proper work for a
philosopher."

This time round, free from the constraints of the academic circus, he's
been free to make 300 additions, including "ableism" -- "it basically
means being condescending to cripples" -- and "zombies". But it's the
subtractions that will cause the biggest stir, as they are mostly
philosophers who have failed to live up to their promise or with whom
Honderich has had spats. He declines to list them -- "you could check
both volumes" -- but he does offer an explanation. "There are bonds of
civility we all owe to other people," he says. "If people break those
bonds we are under a lesser obligation to maintain them ourselves."

Philosophy with attitude is an unusual proposition in British academia,
but for most of his career he has been happy to play by the normal
rules - even down to the practised air of abstracted dishevelment. He
was brought up in Canada, the son of a Mennonite German father and a
Scottish Calvinist mother, and was force-fed a religious diet for much
of his childhood. "Even then I could see that nothing in religion could
possibly be true," he says.

He came to England in 1959. "It was a choice of studying under Freddy
Ayer at UCL or going to fucking Harvard," he laughs. "So it wasn't
really a choice at all." His anglophilia has endured, and much of his
career has been about conforming to the English philosophical
traditions. Even those of dissent. "In the early 1960s, I went on a CND
march with Bertrand Russell and staged a sit-down protest in Trafalgar
Square," he remembers. "He brought a velvet cushion with him."

By the early 1970s, Honderich was fighting his way up the career ladder
at Sussex. "My head of department suggested I should write a book on
political philosophy," he shrugs. "I hadn't given it a moment's thought
before then, but I wanted to keep him happy so I produced a book on the
justification of punishment." This was well received and led to invites
to deliver a paper in the US on political violence, and his reputation
within this field in the UK was made - not least because there was no
competition. "I was still the only philosopher considering acts of
political violence at the time of 9/11."

Although it's this philosophical strand that has grabbed the most
attention, Honderich has made lasting contributions in other, more
conventional, areas of philosophical debate.

For a man who is becoming ever more radical and grumpy in old age,
Honderich is surprisingly content within himself. The pain of falling
short of his own high moral standards throughout his life has eased and
he enjoys his new life in the west country. He still wakes up at 5am,
though now with joy, not anxiety - "I get a remarkable clarity of
thought at that time of day, even if many of the thoughts turn out to
be misconceived" - and his lifelong fear of death has become less
pathological.

This, needless to say, has nothing to do with refinding his religious
roots. "The last time I prayed was when I was 14," he says. "A snow
plough had covered a group of us under a mass of snow and I was praying
to be rescued even as I lost consciousness."

So how come his rescue didn't reinforce a belief in the power of
prayer? "The rescuer hit me on the head with his spade. I kind of
thought that if there were a God the spade would have missed." Spoken
like a true consequentialist.

The CVName: Ted HonderichAge: 72Job: Grote professor emeritus
of the philosophy of mind and logic, University College LondonBefore that: lecturer in
philosophy, Sussex University, 1962-4: lecturer, professor, Grote
professor, UCL, 1964- 1998Selected publications: Oxford
Companion to Philosophy; Conservatism: Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair?;
After the Terror; On Determinism and Freedom; Philosopher: A Kind of
LifeLikes: wine and old housesDislikes: Blair and New LabourMarried: with two children